The War of Wars

by Robert Harvey

  Wurmser, whose men in Mantua were now starving and had been denied any hope of relief, sued for peace, claiming he still had twelve months’ worth of provisions. Napoleon was disposed to be generous and even promised Wurmser, a renegade Frenchman whom the Directory had ordered to be shot, that he could return to Vienna. On 2 February the French marched victoriously into Mantua without a fight.

  The Directory ordered Napoleon south, to punish the Pope for continuing to side with the Austrians. This proved all too easy: a series of papal towns fell without a struggle, including Bologna, Rimini and Macerata, and he was delighted to take Ancona, the second most important Adriatic port after Venice. The Pope sued for peace and under the Treaty of Tolentino ceded Bologna, Ferrara and Romagna to the French, as well as paying Napoleon 30 million francs.

  One of the Directors, the atheist La Revellière, demanded that the Pope be deposed. But Napoleon realized that this sixty-nine-year-old posed no threat, and feared igniting a religious war. The Pope, he argued, stabilized central Italy and prevented its seizure by the Kingdom of Naples under Queen Maria Carolina, Marie Antoinette’s sister. He assured La Revellière that the Papal States would fall to pieces by themselves, while similarly reassuring Pius VI that he had no intention of retaining them.

  He then galloped back a hundred miles to the north to prepare the final blow against Austria in March. In order to achieve this, the Directory reinforced his army to 80,000 men and sent him, as counterbalances, Generals Bernadotte and Delmas. The former, a highly competent Gascon officer who had worked his way up the ranks to become a general at the age of just thirty-one, was a passionate Jacobin and close friend of St Just. Tall, good-looking, vain and endowed with a fiery temper, he was fond of duelling at the slightest insult. Bernadotte’s prickliness and vainglory had earned him a bad reputation, but he was undoubtedly a competent commander and an impressive figure. His problem was that, like Hoche, he did not owe his prominence to Napoleon, but regarded himself as a superior and rival to Napoleon, who was vastly the better soldier. He deeply resented taking orders from Napoleon: ‘Over there I saw a man of twenty-six or twenty-seven who wants to appear fifty. It bodes no good for the Republic . . . I see it all. Bonaparte is jealous of me and wants to disgrace me. I have no resource left but to blow my brains out.’ Worse still, Bernadotte was married to Napoleon’s childhood sweetheart, Désirée, who deeply resented having been dumped for Josephine.

  Napoleon’s offensive against Austria with his reinforced and reinvigorated army was perfectly executed. He sent the capable Jourdan up the Brenner Pass to cut off the 15,000 Austrians still stranded in the Dolomites and to prevent a flanking attack by the Rhine Army. He personally commanded four divisions coming up from Bassano on 10 March and easily defeated a smaller force under the legendary Austrian Archduke Charles at Tagliamento before taking Klagenforth on 29 March.

  The French army under Moreau along the Rhine, which was supposed to launch a simultaneous offensive, made no move, and Napoleon decided he could not take Vienna alone. He marched on Leoben, some seventy-five miles from the Austrian capital, and sent forward an advance to Semmering, just outside Vienna, to intimidate the court. He was fearful of over-extending his lines. This intimidation had the desired effect: the royal court hurriedly evacuated Vienna for Hungary. Napoleon threatened the Austrians with attack from two directions – although he had no way of ensuring that Moreau would do his part, possibly because the Directory was wary of enhancing his reputation through giving him such a project.

  Napoleon drew up a peace treaty with the Austrians, although he had no authority to reach one. The treaty, like the one reached with the Pope, was relatively generous. Austria would be allowed to retain Istria, Dalmatia and Friuli, but it was to recognize that Belgium belonged to France, and to cede the lonian Islands as well as the left bank of the Rhine, while recognizing Napoleon’s new Cisalpine Republic in Italy. Most controversially, Napoleon offered to capture Venice and deliver it up to the Austrians. This combination of threats and bribes was enough for the Austrian court, which agreed to these terms on 18 April.

  Napoleon turned to the town of Verona which had risen and massacred a French garrison behind him with the connivance of the Venetians. Verona quickly surrendered, but Napoleon now had his excuse to threaten the Doge of Venice. Ignoring instructions from the Directory to leave the city state alone, he moved upon it and seized it. Napoleon followed this up by seizing the Venetian lonian islands of Corfu, Cephalonia and Zante without any opposition. He had no authority from the Directory to do so.

  He returned triumphantly to the Mombello Palace outside Milan. There he was joined by his family, upon which he lavished spoils in the style of a medieval monarch, not a republican general. Joseph was appointed ambassador to Rome with an enormous salary; and presents were lavished on Lucien, Jerome and Louis, as well as his sisters. At last the matriarch, Letizia, arrived. Napoleon embraced her on her arrival outside Milan and she told him, ‘Today I am the happiest mother in the world.’ But she stayed only two weeks before returning to Corsica.

  Like other members of his family, she disapproved intensely of the frivolous Josephine, with her Parisian sophistication, expensive tastes, sexy clothes and barely hidden passion for Hippolyte Charles – Napoleon’s young, beautiful and cheeky sister Pauline would stick out her tongue behind Josephine’s back. Napoleon caught the passionate seventeen-year-old Pauline making love to one of his former officers, General Victor Emmanuel Leclerc, and insisted they get married immediately; her plain older sister Elisa similarly got married to a dull Corsican aristocrat in June. Napoleon was now in effect King of northern Italy.

  Stendhal judged Napoleon’s northern Italian campaigns to be his finest military actions. In fact they cannot compare with some of his later battles such as Austerlitz, which were far more complex affairs. But his achievement had by any standards been remarkable. The Directory itself reckoned that he had taken 150,000 prisoners, 540 cannon, and nine 64-gun battleships, twelve frigates and eighteen galleys. He had won eighteen major battles and sixty-seven lesser military actions.

  To what extent could Napoleon himself claim the credit? With the exception of the Battle of Rivoli, the Italian campaign was a case of small-scale engagements of rapid manoeuvre, marching and counter-marching with small forces to outflank and outwit the enemy. It was somewhere between guerrilla warfare and classic eighteenth-century pitched fighting.

  Napoleon’s forces in Italy were not particularly brave or impressive, while the Austrian armies, although braver and more prone to defend their positions, tended to follow old-fashioned military injunctions and were overloaded with provisions. Another qualification to Napoleon’s skills must be the nature of the French army. Carnot had been its creator. Thanks to the levée en masse, it was the most modern, efficient and above all the largest fighting force in Europe. It was a huge conscript army staffed by officers who rose to the top at this stage largely through merit and who had until recently faced the possibility that failure might be rewarded by the guillotine.

  Napoleon did not create this system: he inherited it from Dumouriez and Carnot. But he added powerful incentives of his own, carrots rather than sticks. He permitted his men the freedom to feed off the land – the main advantage being that they were not encumbered by baggage trains – and saw to it that they were well fed and paid on time, usually through plunder. He also inspired them with injunctions to honour and glory and instituted the idea of awarding the Legion of Honour. To be a soldier in Napoleon’s army was not to be a wretched, coerced minion destined to be cannon fodder, but a reasonably fed and clothed member of an almost invariably victorious army in the service of France and revolutionary idealism. They felt they were fighting for their country, not their feudal lords, as the Austrians did.

  Yet Napoleon’s greatness in this campaign lay in his energy, tactical speed and grasp of strategy. It has been said that he was not a true military innovator, and this is doubtless true, but he did apply quasi-esta
blished military doctrines with a skill and ferocity that had never occurred before. His greatest gift, of course, was as an artillery man. France in fact was way ahead of other countries, in its modernization of artillery, a product of the ancien régime. As far back as 1763, Jean-Baptiste de Gribeauval, introduced lighter gun barrels of 12 or 24cm calibre which could be easily brought up and used in field battles, not just sieges, as had previously been the case. In 1793 7,000 cannon were produced in one year, a mass production of weaponry without precedent. Napoleon, as an artilleryman himself, had scorn for the ancient muskets with their propensity to jam, blow up or miss – at 200 yards only a quarter of shots hit their target, while as close as seventy-five yards only two-thirds did – and the time it took to reload, only one or two shots a minute being the average. Napoleon sensibly relied on using bayonets to frighten the enemy. But he also used artillery to devastating effect when he began any battle, and relied also on irregular snipers with lighter weapons to push forward and intimidate the enemy by shooting their officers.

  Napoleon’s battle tactics were usually to push his cavalry forward to attempt to defeat the enemy cavalry and force the infantry into squares, which while effective defensively had much less firepower than a general line. Then he would seek to break up the squares, with horse supporting the infantry to sow confusion. He also relied on a combination of tactics which had been used before him individually but rarely used in unison.

  First, he broke with the age-old tradition of continental armies and insisted on unity of command: his generals were guided by him alone and the French were thus spared the competing commanders and armies that so plagued eighteenth-century battles – most notably and recently of course during the war in northern France and the Low Countries, where the armies of different Countries got in each others’ way.

  Secondly, he kept his men deployed along a wide front, at a distance from the enemy. This encouraged the enemy to do the same. Then he would choose a point of attack and bring his forces together with speed to overwhelm an enemy’s weakest point. Speed and concentration of force were thus beautifully choreographed. The speed with which Napoleon moved his troops displayed all the brilliance of a natural guerrilla commander. In part this derived from the high morale of the troops, and the spoils promised them. They were not grudging peasants who had to be coerced every inch of the way but men who believed they would win and enrich themselves if they obeyed the command to move fast: time and again victories were won by men marching through the night and appearing suddenly out of the blue, surprising and demoralizing the enemy – most notably at the Battle of Rivoli.

  Napoleon’s other favourite tactic was the flanking movement: he rarely attacked from the front except when forced to, for example across bridges. When he did so, he always ensured that another force would materialize on a flank or to the rear to demoralize the enemy (the mouvement sur les derrières – which excited many a ribald comment). The trick here was to bring his army up in corps, each with its own cavalry and artillery, despatching one (usually weak) force to engage the enemy frontally, and then sending a flanking force to strike from the side or rear. Sometimes the flanking force would be quite small, or sometimes it would be the main force but it had to arrive precisely in time to rescue the frontal or so-called ‘pinning’ force. This required accurate timing: the enemy ideally would have committed his own reserves to battle in an effort to overwhelm the frontal force before the flanking attack.

  Another favourite tactic was to drive a wedge through the ‘hinge’, the weakest point between enemy armies, often a hill, wood or river, and then take the separate forces on one at a time. Thus, even if Napoleon had a smaller army than the enemy overall, he would have a larger one than the particular enemy detachment he was attacking; meanwhile, he would send a smaller force to engage the second army until the first force had been overwhelmed and he could bring up reinforcements. Amusingly, in one account when Napoleon met an Austrian captain on a road and asked him about the progress of the campaign, he pretended to be an Italian – this being before the days of photography when he would be recognized. The Austrian replied: ‘They’ve sent a young madman who attacks right and left, front and rear. It’s an incredible way of waging war.’

  Napoleon’s tactics were not gentlemanly in the understood eighteenth-century manner. He would do anything to win. Napoleon also had a grasp of nuts and bolts maxims: never to allow his lines of communication to be extended too far, which meant, for example, that he had to stop on the march to Vienna; like Nelson, always to attack, never wait for the enemy to do so first; always to aim for the enemy army, not cities or bases (which in fact he failed to live up to in the case of Mantua); and always to keep to a single objective.

  Some of these are fairly mundane military maxims. But perhaps the key element of Napoleon’s military genius (as opposed to his political philosophy where his abilities were soon to shade into megalomania) was that he combined skill, speed and imagination with the sharp mathematical brain of a skilled artilleryman. Napoleon was simultaneously supremely skilled in the most plodding arts of war and a half-insane dreamer. He said once:

  Military science consists in calculating all the chances accurately in the first place, and then in giving accident exactly, almost mathematically, its place in one’s calculations. It is upon this point that one must not deceive oneself, and yet a decimal more or less may change all. Now this apportioning of accident and science cannot get into any head except that of a genius. Accident, hazard, chance, call it what you may, a mystery to ordinary minds, becomes a reality to superior men.

  Yet he realized the limits of a purely mechanical approach to war:

  Tactics, evolution and the sciences of the engineer and the artillery officer may be learned from treatises, much as in the same way as geometry, but the knowledge of the higher branches of the art of war is only to be gained by experience and by studying the history of man and battles of great leaders. Can one learn in a grammar to compose a book of the lliad, or one of Corneille’s tragedies?

  His secret was that he combined the two: science with improvisation. The extraordinary paradox of Napoleon’s character was that he was a supremely practical military commander, and yet was later to become virtually a political lunatic in his crazed schemes for dominating the world – a unique combination. Many have tried to compare him with, in a later generation, Hitler. But the latter was never a practical man: he was a demented, if inspired, demagogue who achieved success only at that level. Napoleon was to combine crazed vision with superb, even mathematical practicality, in an almost Einsteinian way. His feet were planted in military boots on the ground, while his head was in the higher realms of the geostrategic clouds.

  This was the new King of northern Italy. His exercise of the role was the first time he showed his capacity for government – and it was deeply revealing. Two things characterized his rule: a mixture of plunder and genuine idealism. Napoleon’s whole personality and success were to be defined by the fact that he combined superb military professionalism with naked and ruthless political opportunism, as well as some crazed ideas and ambitions. Again, that made him quite different from later political tyrants such as Hitler, Mussolini or Mao, who had the last two but not the first, or Stalin, who had only the second.

  Napoleon’s problem was that he also thought he was a ruler of genius. The worst aspect of his rule was the plundering in which, he could claim in self-defence, he was merely carrying out the orders of the Directory. Napoleon wrote to the Directory: ‘We have taken almost everything fine in Italy except a few objects which are at Turin and Naples.’ Lombardy paid 20 million francs and gave up all the paintings and works of art that could be seized by the French. Modena paid 10 million francs and twenty paintings. Pavia paid 2 million francs and twenty paintings. Some 6 million francs were seized from Venice, along with the four bronze horses of St Mark’s, the Lion of Venice and the treasure of the Doge’s Palace. From Parma he grabbed Corregio’s superb ‘Dawn in Naples’
: ‘The possession of such a masterpiece at Paris will adorn that capital for ages, and give birth to similar exertions of genius.’

  Galileo’s manuscripts on fortifications, many of Leonardo’s scientific treatises, and works of Giorgione, Rafael, Mantegna, Filippo Lippi and Andrea del Sarto were taken, while a hundred of Italy’s finest carriage horses were seized as ‘works of art’. The Pope was made to yield a hundred paintings, 500 manuscripts, several statues and 21 million francs in tribute. Italians were later to say that post-Napoleonic silver was worthless, because all the antique silver had been plundered by Napoleon.

  Napoleon was thought to have kept some 40 million of the 50 million francs raised for himself and his associates, including at least 3 million for himself personally. Joseph, his brother, bought a large house in Paris with his share and Letizia completely rebuilt the house at Ajaccio. Napoleon bought a house for himself on the rue de la Victoire, a large estate in Belgium and a huge house and estate on the banks of the Seine for Josephine, which cost a colossal 335,000 francs.

  Napoleon’s actual exercise of power was overlaid by a combination of humbug and idealism. It is hard to separate the two, but it seems clear that he resisted the Directory in its desire to promote Italy’s developing republican sentiment. Napoleon explained his views on the new Cisalpine Republic:

  The republic is divided into three parties: 1) the friends of their former government, 2) the partisans of an independent but rather aristocratic constitution, 3) the partisans of the French constitution and of pure democracy. I repress the first, I support the second, and moderate the third. I do so because the second is the party of the rich landowners and priests, who in the long run will end by winning the support of the mass of the people which it is essential to rally around the French party.